While I'd like to see the cliche about the severely bickering couple ending up making out with each other (eg, Sam & Diane, Buffy & Spike, etc) i don't see how to subvert it without it becoming a domestic violence case.

While I'd like to see the cliche about the severely bickering couple ending up making out with each other (eg, Sam & Diane, Buffy & Spike, etc) i don't see how to subvert it without it becoming a domestic violence case.

I'd love to see a scene where someone tries to bully their way past some security checkpoint and goes for the usual "don't you know who I am? The general is going to be so upset if you waste his time!!!" kind of nonsense, and the sentry just adamantly refuses to break protocol.

There are a bunch of other similar things. For instance, a baddie is held prisoner and suddenly starts having a seizure. So the guards rush in... but only after summoning backup just in case it's a ruse. Etc.

I also strongly agree with "the rogue hero has a theory that everyone poo-poos, but he doggedly pursues it, regulations be damned... and it turns out that he's totally wrong", and the related "the rogue hero comes up with a plan to save the day that is 'too risky' for those stuffed shirts at HQ... but he tries it out all on his own, and it fails spectacularly and kills a lot of innocent people".

There are a bunch of other similar things. For instance, a baddie is held prisoner and suddenly starts having a seizure. So the guards rush in... but only after summoning backup just in case it's a ruse. Etc.

I'd love to see a scene where someone tries to bully their way past some security checkpoint and goes for the usual "don't you know who I am? The general is going to be so upset if you waste his time!!!" kind of nonsense, and the sentry just adamantly refuses to break protocol.

There are a bunch of other similar things. For instance, a baddie is held prisoner and suddenly starts having a seizure. So the guards rush in... but only after summoning backup just in case it's a ruse. Etc.

Things grind to a halt in SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER, when a bona fide cop pulls over a car and announces that he's commandeering the vehicle -- only to get told that, no, as it happens, I know you don't actually have the right to do that.

La La Land subverts several of the cliches of a Hollywood musical -- the "meet cute" and the happy ending most notably.

__________________
"East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does."Purveyor of fine science fiction since 1982.

Mexican stand off. Two enemies pointing guns at each other's faces at point-blank range. Until one makes some fairly obvious conclusions about human reaction time compared to estimated flight time of a bullet over c. 15cm and just pulls his trigger.

"That's crazy, it'll never work! You'll burn it out if you overload the power!"
"Dammit, Ash! You number-crunchers in the lab don't get what it's like out here in the field. We don't get the luxury of running calculations, we just have to go with our gut!"
*Goes with gut. Sparks fly. "It" burns out due to power overload*

Just for once could the petite "martial artist" get their ass handed to them by the hulking guard. Combat sports are segregated by weight. There is a reason Mayweather never fought Danny Williams.

In 1997 Darth Ennis wrote a four-issue miniseries for DC's Vertigo title updating the story of the Unknown Solider. At one point CIA agent Clyde delivers a judo chop to the neck of a hulking assailant- who doesn't even blink. Clyde (narrating in flashback) says something like the following "If you study martial arts, there's something your sensei ought to tell you: no matter how good you are, if your opponent is a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier than you, you're going to lose."

"Knock out gas" pumped into the ventilation system. I came across this most recently playing Grand Theft Auto V, but I've seen this in TV shows and other media.

It turns out there's a reason anesthesiologists exist. Too little anesthesia and you won't be unconscious, too much and you'll be dead. Tolerances vary from person to person.

For a real-life version of this trope with real-life consequences, read about the 2002 Moscow Hostage Crisis. (Short summary: Russian Spetnaz units pumped an unknown sedative into the theater and 140 hostages died from adverse affects of the gas.)

Homely girl lets her hair down takes off her glasses, and is still homely.

"Here's my phone number- it's 381....."

Guy collapses. Cop rushes over to him, puts his finger on his neck for 0.3 seconds and says "he's dead". EMT shoves cop away, starts CPR, and the guy survives.

Detective shows up for work on his last day. He finishes up his paperwork, goes out to lunch, and nothing much happens the rest of the day and he retires in peace.

The 1990 movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane:

Ford Fairlane: Hey, look. Write down my number: 555-6321 Got it?
Twin Club Girl: Yeah. Wait a minute. 555 is not a real number. They only use that in the movies.
Ford Fairlane: No shit, honey. What do you think this is? Real life?

I'd love to see a scene where someone tries to bully their way past some security checkpoint and goes for the usual "don't you know who I am? The general is going to be so upset if you waste his time!!!" kind of nonsense, and the sentry just adamantly refuses to break protocol.

Possibly the only good scene in the animated Titan A.E.:

Heroes are trying to sneak past a guard in disguise.

"Wait a minute. You're too tall to be a <title>, this robe is the completely wrong shade of red, and I'm pretty sure that guy's a hum-" <get clocked over the head with a gun butt>

Ford Fairlane: Hey, look. Write down my number: 555-6321 Got it?
Twin Club Girl: Yeah. Wait a minute. 555 is not a real number. They only use that in the movies.
Ford Fairlane: No shit, honey. What do you think this is? Real life?

The Last Action Hero
"How can everyone's phone number start with 555?"
"Area codes."

Homely girl lets her hair down takes off her glasses, and is still homely...

The gay teenager is a jock with no interest in theatre/fashion/etc, isn't a girl's GBF, and is just as much of a horny hormone crazed pervert has his straight teammates. Also have the cheerleaders be brainy, active in student government, & NHS members.

Characters fail to outrun explosion in slow motion and are not killed outright, but permanently disfigured.

I actually subverted that cliché in one of my books. The hero is running away from a missile strike. He wakes up in the hospital four days later. Lucky for him, this is a SF series set a couple hundred years in the future and they were able to clone him some skin and fix the third degree burns over 80% of his body and repair the internal damage from the pressure wave.

I'd love to see a scene where someone tries to bully their way past some security checkpoint and goes for the usual "don't you know who I am? The general is going to be so upset if you waste his time!!!" kind of nonsense, and the sentry just adamantly refuses to break protocol.

Real life related story.

The guy in charge (whoever/whatever) of the US Naval Academy came in late one night, with a friend. He was out of uniform and apparently without a workable ID.

The poor guard, probably some 19 year old dweeb with bad acne, refused admittance.

Dick in charge raised a big fuss and threatened dire consequences. Dweeb held his ground.

. . . Villain is caught and taken to jail at the end. He doesn't die in a hail of bullets, he doesn't blow up on top of a building or fall to his death or crash into the ocean or have a semi truck fall on him. He just gets arrested and hauled away. . . . .

And at no time does he confess to the crime. He's going to stick to his guns and fight the charges the whole way. Without bragging that he's going to get off.

Actually, there are quite a few films in which the couple who you think are going to get together through most of the film don't end up together. Both La La Land and Café Society in the past year were like this. So are Casablanca, Play It Again, Sam, Annie Hall, My Best Friend's Wedding, Shakespeare in Love, Brief Encounter, and (500) Days of Summer. And that's just to list the ones where (eventually) the couple mutually decide that they aren't right for each other. There are also many where one of them dies. There are ones where one of them realizes the other is a jerk and gets as far as possible away from the jerk. There are ones where the jerk goes away because they didn't love the other person and is now bored with them. There are those where one of them, who isn't a jerk, decides that someone else would be better for them. I have been talking and writing for a while about at least some of these being examples of a genre I call the anti-romantic comedy, although that's not a perfect name. I suspect that the love-doesn't-triumph-over-all genre has been around just as long as the love-triumphs-over-all genre. The most famous example is Romeo and Juliet.

Here's a website with examples of movies where the couple don't end up together:

I'd add: Faye Kellerman's Police Lieutenant Peter Decker. His personal history is wildly and crazily complicated -- he's Jewish, but he isn't, but after all he is -- "functionally", though, he seems to have a mostly-happy marriage, and to be a loving husband / father / stepfather.

I would spiritedly disagree. He is not a nice man.He's emotionally abusive to Rina and particularly to her younger boy. The only family membershe's ever nice to is Hannah, his daughter.

I actually subverted that cliché in one of my books. The hero is running away from a missile strike. He wakes up in the hospital four days later. Lucky for him, this is a SF series set a couple hundred years in the future and they were able to clone him some skin and fix the third degree burns over 80% of his body and repair the internal damage from the pressure wave.

There are three murders in The Maltese Falcon--Miles Archer, Floyd Thursby, and Captain Jacoby.

There are, technically, no murders in DIAL M FOR MURDER. I mean, yeah, there's an attempted murder, and there's another attempted murder, and in between somebody gets killed in self-defense; but nobody actually gets murdered while various folks rush hither and yon trying to get evidence that'll stand up in court.

While admittedly I never watched her show, I can't exactly see Angela Lansbury's character sitting in a darkened office with the obligatory shadow of Venetian blinds on the wall behind her, with her fedora, triple scotch, three day stubble, and Camel dangling from the corner of her mouth, mordantly pondering the existential dread and ennui of "too many women, too many pills"* thing.

*thank-you, Mr. Johnson

So true, as have been others' identifications in this thread of police/detective procedurals that do feature well-adjusted, non-traumatized main characters.

I was more so thinking about franchises like SVU that, especially in the later seasons, emphasize storylines about characters' personal problems and histories that are downright melodramatic and hackneyed. These storylines bore the crap outta me, especially episodes where a criminal nemesis kidnaps one of the detectives (almost always a female detective). Among the many things I loved about The Wire was the resistance to these lazy tropes (true, we did see into the characters' personal lives, but I never found it to be melodramatic).

Is it possible to make a compelling mystery that isn't a murder mystery?

In one of Dorothy L Sayers' Peter Wimsey books - Gaudy Night, which seems to be one of the most popular books - there are no murders at all, though there is a sort of attempted murder or two. But yes, it is much more difficult - that book's from over 80 years ago.

I could die happy if I never saw another movie where the old guy ends up with the hot young woman - like Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta Jones (Entrapment), or Bruce Willis and Mary Louise Parker (RED), or Stallone/Sandra Bullock (Demolition Man)...

I guess the folks who write these movies think all girls have this daddy-thing going on.

1) Female characters who act like emotionally volatile, mean bitches to show they are independent, empowered women. No, it doesn't. Genuinely empowered, independent women don't act like that. This trope is one of the reasons I stopped reading urban fantasy. But it also shows up in sit coms like Home Improvement.

2) Detectives who spot the suspect and identify themselves from too far away. The suspect bolts and runs, causing a big chase. It could have all been prevented if the detectives waited until they were closer to the suspect before identifying themselves.

3) Detectives who don't call for backup when it is clearly needed, but go in on their own.

I could die happy if I never saw another movie where the old guy ends up with the hot young woman - like Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta Jones (Entrapment), or Bruce Willis and Mary Louise Parker (RED), or Stallone/Sandra Bullock (Demolition Man)...

I guess the folks who write these movies think all girls have this daddy-thing going on.

Agreed. At least the girl in RED did say she was hoping that Bruce Willis had more hair...

Is it possible to make a compelling mystery that isn't a murder mystery?

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. (It's a kid's book.)

Also, there is a famous mystery in which a murder is thought to have been committed, but it turns out to have been an accident:

SPOILER:

The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers

There are also a couple of mystery short stories by Isaac Asimov in a book called Tales of the Black Widowers: "The Acquisitive Chuckle", in which a character knows someone has stolen something of his, but he's a hoarder and doesn't know what it was; and "Ph as in Phony" (or maybe it was "The Phony PhD") in which a person is known to have cheated on an exam, but no one can figure out how.

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